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About 3,500 people marched last Friday in Hibiya Park in Tokyo against the government’s plan to amend the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. On last Friday Japan marked the 66th anniversary of the enforcement of its pacifist constitution.

Leaders of the Japanese Communist Party and Japan’s Social Democratic Party, Shii Kazuo and Mizuho Fukushima, also joined in the march, holding a banner which reads “to maintain the shining of the Article 9 and not allow any amendment that could worsen the constitution,” according to the Chinese press.

On the other hand, right-wingers marched in order to support the changing of Japan’s supreme law.

Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plans to change Japan’s pacifist constitution, which took effect in 1947 after Japan’s defeat in the World War II, so as to make Japan’s Self-Defense Forces a full national army.

Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which holds majority seats in the lower house, is trying to win upper house election that will be held in July. The party plans to change the constitution with supports from other parties’ conservative politicians.